INTREPID READER: A-hem!
CALVINPITT: Huh? OH! Hey, how you doing? You're a little early.
I.R.: What are you doing?
CALVINPITT: What do you mean?
I.R.: What's with all the sandbags?
CALVINPITT: Sandbags?
I.R.: Yes, sandbags, the ones in front of your windows? The ones you're filling right now?
CALVINPITT: Oh, sandbags! Oh, well you can never be too careful you know. Never know when mumble, mumble.
I.R.: Huh?
CALVINPITT: Huh?
I.R.: Never mind. What did you want to see me about?
CALVINPITT: Just one minute. (CALVIN feverishly fills his last few sandbags, throws them in front of the blog's windows.) Really, just one more minute! (Runs inside blog, shuts door.)
I.R.: What an idiot. I can't believe I married him. Or that it took two days to divorce him.
CALVINPITT: Here! (CALVIN throws a baseball at INTREPID READER. It bounces off their chest and lands at their feet.)
I.R.: Hey, that hurt ass#$%^! (Have you ever noticed TV always bleeps "hole" but not "ass"? I thought "ass" was the profane word)
CALVINPITT: Read the note!
I.R.: Huh? (Looking down, you notice a note tied to the baseball. You bend down to pick it up. Roll one six-sided die, and add the number to your AGILITY. If the total is less than 11, read the paragraph directly below. If it's more than 11, skip to the paragraph below that. Sorry Chris.)
As you bend down to grap the baseball, you become overbalanced and fall in the moat. As the pirahnas devour you (just like that guy in #3 of the 12-issue Punisher maxi-series), you hear CALVIN say "Damnit! What kind of a clumsy bastard are you?!"You bend down to pick up the baseball without incident. You pull off the note and read it. It says:
What's so special about Grant Morrison?
(End)
How's that for decompression? Shoot, give me New Avengers! I guarantee a villain battle every issue, and no goddamn Sentry! Plenty of Warbird and her sash though!
You know, I may not have to worry about my blog being burned down by the Capital One barbarians after all. With all the bloggers being replaced by their opposites I may be safe. In fact, I'm eagerly awaiting Scipio's post about how much he loves Marvel, and how stupid Vibe is. Of course, Grant Morrison love may be one of those things that transcends whether it's Bizarro-Ragnell or not. I'm screwed.So what is it that makes Morrison so loved/enjoyed by the comic-reading public? I have to confess that I've read little of his work. Basically about ten issues of JLA. It was good stuff, but I enjoyed Waid and Kelly's stuff about as much. I've tried reading some of Seven Soldiers. There are usually copies of Mister Miracle left, so I've skimmed through them. Maybe it's that I'm not a Mister Miracle fan, or maybe I just don't get the point Morrison is trying to make. All-Star Superman has no effect on me because a) I don't enjoy Frank Quitely's art. I'm not saying it's bad, it's not, there's just about ten or fifteen artists I can think of I enjoy more, and b) Morrison is writing Ridiculously Powerful Superman, my original comics arch-nemsis. That's right, predating JMS when he pitched The Other, or the Idiot at DC Who Crippled Bill Willingham by Removing Tim Drake's Supporting Cast, or even the Moron Who Thought Maximum Carnage was a Good Idea. Really, the only way to make a book less palatable to me would be to describe it as a book for "fans of hardcore yaoi manga".
Where was I? Oh yeah, Morrison. Maybe JLA is the wrong book to look at. It may be that since he was writing DC's flagship book (as I would think the title that contains all your premier characters would be), he had to reign in his tendencies. Perhaps Animal Man let him run wild. So what is it about him? I've heard he has layer upon layer of symbolism, so that reading his comics is like watching Neon Genesis Evangelion: Everytime you find something new. Or is it that he captures the Silver Age sense of "ideas that are so absurd, they're really cool" (that seemed to be part of the appeal to All-Star Superman #1).
Is my problem that I focus on art, with the writing being of secondary importance to me? Like I've said before, pretty art can hide a lot of flaws from me (Bagley on Ultimate Spider-Man) or make it much harder for me to enjoy a story (Damion Scott on Robin) if the art doesn't "click" for me (which is why I tend not to say an artist is terrible, because it's that they simply don't match what I find aesthetically pleasing. They're still vastly superior to me, especially considering they're on deadlines. Yes, that includes Liefeld. If I only had a month to draw a book, I doubt I could even match him.)
So let the Grant Morrison love-fest begin! Or, if Len gets here first, the Morrison-Bashing-Fest.
8 comments:
Grant Morrison has always been hit or miss for me. Some of his stuff I love; other stuff not so much.
ANd for the record I really, really don't like Neon Genesis Evangelion. That's usually what gets people up in arms and after me...
I actually read through all the Animal man trades today.
I will buy them shortly.
But, to explain it to you in marvel comic book terms, here's why people love morrison.
If John Byrne is Dr. Doom, and we all know he is, then Grant Morrison is Reed Richards.
You can count on Reed to save the day, and Morrison to pen an enjoyable (if in some cases not buyable) book.
There are few times they fail but they have about a 90% success rate. This leads people to always count on them, and so when they do poorly most people are a little shocked or indifferent because they didn't rely on them.
Bryne/Doom on the other hand, his plans fail many times, but you always want him to come back! He's just such an egnimatic person that you always want him to try again! And when he wins it's doubley sweet because in some dark coner of our brains we like evil. I know I do, I read Namor.
I don't know if that helped or made your brain melt in sheer slendor of my idiocy.
Morrison has several strengths:
1) Stuff happens. Almost everything Morrison writes, things are constantly going on. You may not find it interesting (or comprehensible), but you can never say about anything Morrison writes that nothing really happened.
2) Morrison can turn the Morrison meters up and down as appropriate. Morrison does not write every book the same; instead, he adjusts the two main Morrison meters--(surrealism) and (nifty throwaway idea level) to suit what he writing. His JLA is a highly clever, energetic but fairly conventional superhero book; it's the platonic ideal of a team book in many ways. Doom Patrol, on the other hand, turns the surrealism up very high. So he adjusts his style to his story (within limits, anyway).
3) HUGE CREATIVITY. Morrison's ideas bust at the seams with more ideas than he can use, which IMO, give depth to his work and are usually interesting in themselves. His stories are full of nifty ideas I haven't seen before.
4) Surrealism. Morrison is good at writing surrealistic stuff which actually makes sense.
Now, sometimes Morrison drowns in his nifty ideas and surrealism, and he, when writing mainstream superheroes, sometimes just ignores major changes to characters in past events in order to shoehorn them into his plot, but overall, I like him.
However, if you are more interested in art than writing, you likely won't get much out of him.
Morrison's stuff always reads to me like someone who thinks he's smarter than he is and has convinced all his readers of the same idea.
To give a real world example, my girlfriend works with a guy who claims to be the smartest man in the world and has solved two of those "impossible to solve" math problems like in "Good Will Hunting." He's close to solving five others and when he does, he's going to publish a book about them and how the entire mathematical community is wrong and he is right.
The problem is, I talked to the guy for five minutes and as soon as he started explaining one of his theories to me, I spotted the flaw. I don't remember what it was off-hand, but sufficed to say if I haven't taken a math class since 1996 and I figured out his calculus error, someone with a doctorate will do likewise.
Morrison's work is always about minisuns and layered universes and other bullshit pseudoscience that makes no sense, but is delivered in a way that sounds just legitimate enough to piss me off because I know 99% of the people reading it are completely clueless about what he's saying, yet they're going to praise it to no end.
Surrealism as a whole--I won't just blame Morrison--is overrated. It's so easy to write something surrealistic because, by definition, it doesn't have to make any sense. Then all you have to do is sit back and nod at those who pretend to get it and shake your head at those who complain that they wasted their money on your nonsensical blather.
I despise Grant Morrison. He never used me -- not once! -- during his extended tenure on JLA. At least Mark Waid used me in that idiotic "Last Laugh" crossover...
I quite agree with Jake on surrealism. My point was even setting aside surrealism Morrison writes passable and fairly entertaining stories. Nothing you absolutley have to buy and nothing that makes you truely angry as you read it.
Believe it or not, I can find good things to say about Grant Morrison.
The man can come up with some unique ideas, things that are totally crazy more often than not.
When given reign over things on the lowest, most forgotten tiers of comicdom, he blasts out A-level work.
And now, the cons.
He doesn't know how to restrain his ideas at all. If the editors don't reign him in, he runs off anyone who was already reading the book (replacing them with the people reading just for him).
Of course, I have to quote my favorite Grant Morrison line ever. "I don't pay attention to what came before." This was his core approach to writing X-Men. I'd have to say that alone would make any writer ineligible for such a job.
For the record, I'm bitter about the guy because he ruined my favorite X-Man, Cyclops, to such a degree that 3 years after Morrison's run is over, the character is still unrecognizable.
Never quite sure why people were so cheesed off about Scott cheating on Jean. He abandoned his first wife and child back in the early days of X-Factor (and I won't brook any of that evil clone nonsense), so why would be be any better the second time out?
If anybody is still reading this, I'm gonna get sooooo burned...
Anyway, regarding Morrison, plotting is not exactly his strong point but he has more insane ideas than Gardner Fox, John Broome and Stan Lee put together. (Not Kirby or Ditko though ...)
For a person who grew up when comics were more whacked out than gritty, it's pure gold.
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